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World’s Most Networked Man?
It sounds preposterous to consider myself this. I started to wonder what could come out of being ultra networked, though after the Secretary of State’s Science and Technology Advisor (STAS) called me the “social center of the universe,” another colleague told me to “just network for a living” and a former U.S. Embassy Tokyo manager said I was the “best networked guy in the U.S. State Department.”
Could someone claim that he has the most connections? Who could say that he has the broadest network or “the biggest rolodex,” referring to the business card organizer rolodex that used to fill American homes in the 1980s and 1990s? Who’s a true “superconnector?”
Without tooting my own horn, maybe I have become a superconnector as an outgrowth of my personality having ranked 39/40 on the Myers Briggs scale of extroversion. I count 7,800 contacts spread across Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Signal, Telegram, LINE. I showed up at an event in the medium-sized Japanese city of Fukuoka and ran into 12 people. I flew to Papua New Guinea and happened to have two local friends there that were up for lunch. The network results from having started social lives from scratch in 14 cities the past two decades (writing about it here), and then spending free time and vacations to keep them active. I have spent a lifetime of networking, spending so many free hours and even vacations…
